Hopefully we’ll get it on bittrex or somewhere with a larger market post alpha 3.

It’s going to be great to see all these Apps materialise and try them out. If they’re well designed and easy-to-use then they’ll get a lot of attention when SAFE starts getting noticed with testsafecoin. I have faith that we’ll see some cool stuff appear.

well the more I ask them about what’s ok to share now and what isn’t, the less I am understanding

But a quick basic outline of the trip was that I spent High School in Hawaii, where almost 3/4 people are from Asia, so many of my closest friends were from Japan and Korea. One of my best friends @aydenlee is from Seoul, and he was one of the first people I told about MaidSafe once I really became addicted to it so we started a “MaidSafe Korea” facebook page years ago and created lots of content with korean translations.

He kind of fell off for a while during all the delays–as many did–but still held his MAID and wanted more ways to get involved. So fast forward a few years and MaidSafe started to get more investment / interest from Asia and MaidSafe Asia / Solutions was started. They are a group of doers for sure and I have so much respect for their work ethic. They made a joke: “MaidSafe doesn’t have timelines… we do!” and they really mean that!

They schedule many events (and I think they are the masterminds behind the recent Jakarta trip?) and are organizing efforts for developer outreach, mainly. First in Asia–where they are based–and then other areas. They are excited to get as many “Pods” going in Asia as possible, and when they heard about our “MaidSafe Korea” effort, “SAFE-FS,” “AppStore,” “MWApps site,” “SAFEdemo,” “SecretChat,” “JAX / SF Pods,” etc etc over the many years, they became very excited and flew me (and @aydenlee) out to help them as they organize their outreach to new developers.

They are great people and genuinely want to help MaidSafe succeed. They are dedicating their time and resources to the things that MaidSafe might not be able to focus on right now, such as marketing and outreach. It is a great match because that is what I’ve been doing on a smaller scale full time for a while, and they have offered many ways for me to expand this, with weekly prize pools for app competitions, etc.

So our trip was very short and focused. Two days in HK total and nonstop meetings. Must have been 9 meetings across both days, and I felt like I was talking the whole time, because everyone kept asking questions about the apps, APIs, ICOs, SDK’s etc etc. Only time for food and meetings. Was about 10 of us, from different parts of Asia (including Florida haha) namely Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia and Shanghai. We became very organized and got to know each other very well on the trip.

We are starting several projects for the future, and this is the part I can’t really talk too much about but what I can say is that there will be a new forum for MaidSafe Global (draft) and it will be heavily focused on catering to the other languages and fostering regular events overseas in these different countries. It is very exciting because that is where the vastly overwhelming amount of people using SAFE / SafeCoin will be coming from (due to high internet / smartphone penetration and also high percentage of unbanked people). Every second focusing on these areas is time very very well spent.

Well that’s it for now, maybe can take some questions in the next Audio Chat on Thursday (3/6) but that’s all I have to say here. Enjoy all the pictures I posted, and the links, and get excited for what’s to come!

Attended another tech meetup last night for SAFE-FS / SAFE Network outreach. Was the Jacksonville IT Server Meetup, which had about 30 attendees from data center startups, backend devs from various companies, and a presenter from Microsoft who was mostly trying to sell people on MS’s new Azure hosted cloud platform.

The 1.5 hour presentation (audio for the whole thing is avail below) was fine. Like I said, it was a Microsoft ex-employee who created a startup that teaches people how to use Azure. It was funny though because throughout the whole thing, he was kind of complaining about how difficult it is to set up servers, how often they get hacked, how many layers of encryption they have to set up etc etc. He also sounded like a white hat hacker who explained many ways to hack into servers and therefore how to secure against it. Very knowledgeable person, just wish he was working with SAFE instead

Most of his talk just confirmed much of what I’m doing with SAFE to me. He kept talking about JSON-based APIs as the cutting edge for today, which is what SAFE is built on right now, 100%. He said they are much better and simpler (being only keys and values), than what used to be used, like scripts and templates, etc. Yay for SAFE He also said how Microsoft tries to encrypt and “back up” certain things around the globe, but everything just seemed so inferior compared to a totally decentralized internet. I guess I’m kind of jaded / full of my own projects in a way, coming from this 100% decentralized, SAFE Network perspective perhaps not a great thing…

The discussions after the talk were the best. I was able to meet 4 local devs here in JAX who were very open to making connections and we exchanged cards and messages on Meetup.com. One was the event organizer, who I introduced myself to and talked about co-organizing SAFE App Competitions with possible cash prizes from MaidSafe Solutions. He was very excited about this possibility and gave me his cell number and we will follow up on this. He organizes many IT events here in Jacksonville.

I also was able to ask a few questions directly to the man who presented, after he was done, about the field in general, and how he felt about totally decentralized networks, even much further decentralized from Azure, where data isn’t held on servers at all and instead shredded into encrypted chunks that are spread around all the computers of the world. Was interesting to see him forced to think out of his usual box, and his answers were very interesting. He said that for anything like that to work, the encryption would have to be totally bulletproof, and he also said governments would (quote:) “NEVER” accept something like this let’s see!!

Great to be back in the USA and getting back on the ground making connections and making more things happen thanks to the great people at MaidSafe Asia and abroad. Let’s make SAFE happen!!